


you sit there in your heartache, waiting on some beautiful boy to save you from your old ways

by mountainsbeyondmountains



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Allusions to abuse, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1970s, F/M, One Shot, Recreational Drug Use, that seventies show vibes but on anti-depressants
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:20:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24207340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mountainsbeyondmountains/pseuds/mountainsbeyondmountains
Summary: “Sansa, I don’t want to corrupt you.”
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 5
Kudos: 100





	you sit there in your heartache, waiting on some beautiful boy to save you from your old ways

**Author's Note:**

> I've written like 3 different versions of a 70's AU and deleted all of them but who knows but this one will stick.

Jon has no further ambitions for the night except to listen to the new Zeppelin album and smoke what’s left of Theon Greyjoy’s grass— but then Sansa Stark walks into the basement.

Before he was drafted, he lived in the basement of the Starks’ house for two years (when he was sixteen, his mother left to go “find herself” at some California hippie commune, and Jon chose to stay in Wisconsin and “find” his high school diploma). In that time, he can scarcely remember Sansa ever venturing into his domain. Robb and Theon— who was not a blood member of the Stark clan, but close enough— had practically lived down here, and Arya and Rickon had both come thundering down the basement steps countless times. Even Bran used to wage hours-long dungeons and dragons campaigns here with the Reed siblings, before his accident made descending the flight of stairs difficult. Sansa, though, was always elsewhere—reading Jane Austen in her bedroom, suntanning in the backyard as soon as the winter snows melted, going on dates with boys who stayed in their cars and sounded their horns instead of coming to the front door. 

But now at just past ten thirty on a Saturday night, she’s coming down the basement stairs— not the ones from inside the house, but the ones only accessible through the backyard outside. Jon barely has time to extinguish his joint and hide the ashtray behind a copy of  _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  _ before she reaches the bottom step. 

He asks, “Sansa, what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in Chicago?”

In the month since she came back from her freshman year of college and he returned from Vietnam, she’s spoken of little else— how she was finally going to spend the summer somewhere more sophisticated than their small town, and she was going to do it with with her beloved Joffrey Baratheon, son of the mayor, boyfriend of three years, prom king to her queen with matching plastic crowns, and surely her future fiancé. 

Now she says, “I changed my mind. Where is everyone?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Stark are upstairs—”

“You can call them by their first names, you know.”

“No, I can’t. Rickon’s asleep. Bran’s holed up in his room—“

“Probably listening to  _ Dark Side of the Moon  _ backwards to try and decipher the hidden messages.”

“Probably. Arya snuck out about half an hour ago and Robb and Theon went to a party.”

They’d asked Jon if he wanted to come as well, and when he’d declined they’d tried to convince him otherwise. But they didn’t try too hard. Ever since his homecoming, Jon’s had no interest in reliving his high school glory days the way that they seemed to enjoy. Maybe it’s because his hadn’t been as glorious as theirs. 

Besides, lately there’s been a strange energy between Robb and Theon— they’re constantly at each others’ throats, arguing about girls or Star Wars or who owes who gas money. But they also had intense moments of reconciliation— like last week, when a drunk Theon nearly drowned in the Starks’ swimming pool, and Robb had to rescue him. When he’d coughed the water of his lungs, Theon had grinned and asked if Robb was going to give him mouth-to-mouth— even half-dead, Greyjoy was still Greyjoy— and Robb had threatened to push him back in the water again.

Sansa is sitting at the bottom of the steps, not looking at Jon. He can only see half of her face— the left side is hidden by shadow and a veil of auburn hair. “Arya probably went to go see Gendry,” she says.

“Gendry  _ Waters _ ?”

Jon had worked with him briefly at the auto body shop downtown, the summer after graduating. Gendry had only been fifteen then, and had barely said a dozen words in three months. Jon remembers there were rumors that he was Robert Baratheon’s illegitimate son. There was a certain substance to the gossip; Gendry was the best quarterback the high school had seen since Baratheon graduated, and had broken the keg stand record that Baratheon had set two decades before.

“Gendry’s been in love with Arya for years,” Sansa says.

“What, did she tell you that?”

“No. But it’s obvious.”

Still Sansa lingers in the corner. “You can come in, you know,” Jon says tentatively, feeling awkward at coaxing her into her own home. 

She sighs. “I suppose I’d better get it over with.” She sits on the couch beside him, underneath the amber light. Jon can now make out the left side of her face, the inky smeared makeup, glittering tear tracks, and already-purple bruise marring her freckled cheek. 

“Fuck,” he breathes. “Sansa, what happened?”

“You’re smart. You can probably figure it out.”

As he retrieves a cold bottle of beer from the freezer, Jon recalls all the time he witnessed Joffrey slam a door or guiltlessly utter some callous remark; there was even that time he “accidentally” ran over Sansa’s dog with the Camaro that his daddy bought him.

He hands Sansa the bottle; she presses it to her cheek with a sigh of relief. “So you’re not going to Chicago because you broke up with him?” Jon asks.

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

“Please don’t tell anyone,” she says. “I came in the house this way instead of through the front door because I didn’t want anyone to find out, I— I’ll put makeup on til the bruise fades. This entire thing is so embarrassing.”

“Sansa, you don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”

She doesn’t try to argue with him, but Jon can tell just from her expression that she doesn’t agree with him. It’s easy forget sometimes that she’s just as stubborn as the rest of her family. In a desperate attempt to make her laugh, he says, “You know, if you wanted to avoid people, you should’ve climbed up the tree to your bedroom. That’s what Arya does when she sneaks out.”

“God, I’m so uncoordinated, I’d probably end up falling even worse than Bran did,” Sansa says with a watered-down smile. She’s quiet for a long time. The only sound is that of the music, the snarl of guitars and the plaintive lyrics. Then she says, “I picked the wrong Baratheon, didn’t I? Arya has much better judgement than me.”

“Do you want me to kill him for you?” Jon asks very simply.

Sansa’s eyes widen when she realizes that isn’t just bravado. A few days ago, she’d been in the room when Greyjoy was needling him, asking him how many people he’d killed while at war, and Jon had refused to answer. Robb had to intercede, eventually. But now Jon knows that Sansa understands his threat isn’t idle, but sincere, and he is fully capable of carrying it out.

“You can’t. His father’s the mayor,” Sansa says evasively. But she doesn’t outright refuse.

“You’re beloved Ned Stark’s daughter, and I’m a war hero. I’d say we have a good chance of getting away with it.”

“Maybe—“ She shakes her head. “No. I appreciate the offer, but I just want to pretend this never happened.”

Jon can empathize with that.

The record stops, leaving them in humid silence. Sansa rises to change the album and Jon says to her, “Please, no Joni Mitchell.”

“Fuck you,” she replies easily. He’s startled by the unexpected vulgarity; he’s never heard her swear before. Then again, he supposes he’s never truly spoken to her before. 

As a compromise, she puts on Leonard Cohen—  _ something in me yearns to win such a cold and lonesome heroine.  _

Jon doesn’t realize that she’s found his ill-concealed grass until she return to the couch holding the still-smoldering joint between her fingers. “That, um, isn’t mind,” Jon says quickly. He has no doubt that Mrs. Stark won’t hesitate to kick him out of the house, no matter how many medals he won in the war, if she discovers the illicit habit. “It’s Greyjoy’s. His creepy uncle smuggles it down from Canada.”

Sansa laughs, “Relax. I don’t care. I’ve known that the three of you secretly smoke down here since I was thirteen.”

“You have?”

“Yeah. I’m not as stupid as you think I am.”

“I never thought you were stupid.”

Mercifully, Sansa seems not to read into this statement, instead examining the joint. She asks, “How does it make you feel?”

“I don’t know. Calm. It’s fun, I guess.”

She delicately holds it out toward him. “Could you light it again? I want to try it.”

“Sansa, I don’t want to corrupt you.”

She looks at him scornfully, then rises to rifle through the pockets of his leather jacket til she wants his spare lighter. She lights the joint for herself; however, when she inhales, she abruptly lets out a ragged cough. “Here, let me show you,” Jon says. She hands him the joint and his lips close over the slick gloss that Sansa’s mouth left behind.

Her second attempt is more successful. But she says, a little petulantly: “I don’t feel anything.”

“It doesn’t always work the first time.”

This doesn’t seem to satisfy her. “I want to try something else,” she says.

“Oh, Jesus.” He exhales, sighing smoke like a dragon.

“Just trust me. Could you, like, inhale, but not into your lungs? Just hold it in your mouth?”

She says it bold, innocent, and matter-of-fact, but Jon replies: “Fuck, Sansa, you want to shotgun it?”

“If that’s what you call it, then yeah.”

“What gave you that idea?”

“I saw someone do it once, at a party. Now are you going to do it or not?”

He realizes that this impulse is so exactly like her, surprising as it may seem to him— the fact that she witnessed something that struck her fancy, and decided to hold the image until she got the chance to recreate it for herself. Against his better judgement, he decides to play along with the fantasy. He inhales and braces himself. Sansa leans closer across the couch. She doesn’t cup her hands around his mouth to create a tunnel, as he expected her to, but rather places her lips on his directly to breathe in the smoke. It is almost a kiss— if it were anyone else, Jon could call it a kiss, but this is Sansa. It would be inconceivable to kiss her. 

He doesn’t know why she does it. It could be an act of vengeance against Joffrey, or mere curiosity. He doesn’t care to dwell on her motivations. He focuses on the fleeting not-quite-a-kiss— her lips flush against his, her hands— still cold from the bottle earlier— firmly holding his head in place, the silk of her hair brushing against him, the scent of citrus and sunscreen that remains even when she pulls away.

Neither of them remark on what’s just happened, except when Sansa says, “I think I felt something that time.” Jon nods weakly. The record spins on— _myself, I long for love and light, but must it come so cruel and oh so bright?_ They pass the joint back and forth til it dies, sitting side by side in silence, both thoroughly corrupted.


End file.
